“At least I hope there aren’t many tamed monsters left,” added Finn as he and Riveria joined the conversation.
There had been no reported sightings of any carnivorous flowers nor any trace of the red-haired woman since the incident.
The group had visited the Dungeon’s thirtieth floor to investigate the quest Hashana had undertaken before his death. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be found. Where had he found the crystal orb? How did it get into his possession? They still didn’t know. Lulune tried to contact her mysterious client after recovering, but had no luck.
“Well then, shall we be off? Lefiya, Rakuta, are you ready?”
“Ah, yes! Let’s go!”
Now, Aiz and the others had returned to the Dungeon to complete their original objective: to earn money.
While on the surface, they had decided to add another supporter to their battle party, now seven strong.
At the moment, they were on floor thirty-seven.
That required passing through the lower levels and entering the Deep Levels.
Lefiya nodded as Finn gave the order to move out. The second supporter, a newly ranked-up Level 3 adventurer named Rakuta, looked very nervous. She’d been casually invited to join them in the Deep Levels to “study,” and she looked very tense about it.
“Aiz, you were out like a light and didn’t eat anything. You hungry? I’ve still got some of mine left.”
“Thanks, Tiona…but I’m fine.”
Aiz gently refused Tiona’s kindness as the two of them stood up to gather weapons.
The previous leg of their journey had lasted more than half the day, so they had found an isolated room in the back corner of the thirty-seventh floor to have a long rest.
This wasn’t a simple day trip into the Dungeon. Adventurers brought camping supplies when planning to stay underground for long periods of time. It was important for them to regain their strength and get some rest from time to time.
For that reason, many would choose to set up camp at safe points, but sometimes it would be too much work to go all the way back to the closest one. So, like Aiz’s battle party, they would find a relatively safe place during their journey to recuperate.
The room they were in now only had one exit and wasn’t very large. They’d sliced up the walls with their weapons upon arrival. Fragments still lay scattered around the floor.
Whenever the walls or the weaponized landforms were damaged, the Dungeon itself prioritized healing them. In other words, damaging their surroundings prevented monster ambushes.
Putting the last of their sleeping bags and the lamp into the supporters’ backpacks, the battle party left the room.
“But it was a real surprise to find adamantite in those walls! A few slashes and something that valuable pops out? What luck!”
“That adamantite alone should get us quite a bit of money.”
“For sure! That should put a dent in Urga’s bill!”
Tiona had been in a great mood ever since they had prepared the room for camp because they’d found the rare metal just beneath the surface of the Dungeon wall. The Amazon excitedly exchanged words with Lefiya, but Aiz stayed quiet, very much in her own little world just beside them.
The word “Aria.”
The Tamer’s bloodred hair.
Each image stormed through her head one after another.
She was strong…
“Strong, she was so strong…”
Aiz whispered that to herself over and over, reliving the fight in her head time and again, remembering each overwhelming strike.
If only she could have done more, she might have learned something.
She might have been able to figure out how the woman knew the name “Aria.”
If only I was stronger…
Weak.
Still weak.
Aiz Wallenstein, such a weakling.
Aiz mumbled under her breath, cursing herself. If she’d been stronger than that woman, if she’d had more power in her hands, if her mind and body hadn’t been so weak…More words arose from the dark, muddy place in the back of her head.
She’d lost her edge at some point.
Her one and only desire had become nothing more than a memory.
Without realizing it, Aiz had let her motivation slip.
That forgotten scene now quietly burned with indignation within her soul.
“…Umm, Miss Aiz?”
It took all the courage Lefiya had to speak up.
Aiz’s response didn’t make it past her lips.
At that moment, a group of monsters appeared at the other end of the long pathway.
Aiz drew Desperate from its sheath and stepped forward with purpose.
This swarm of monsters knew the presence of the adventurers and moved to attack. Aiz strode out in front of the group and moved like the wind to engage them alone.
As the monster howls made her skin crawl, Aiz could feel Lefiya’s gaze on her back.
However, the blond knight’s expression seemed frozen as she whipped her blade through the air and kicked off the ground.
The thirty-seventh floor of the Dungeon was known as the White Palace.
That name was based on two things: the pale-white color of the walls and its extremely complex layout that made it a labyrinth in its own right. The scale was completely different from any of the floors leading down to it. All the rooms and hallways were spacious and wide. There were a few exceptions, like where Aiz’s battle party had camped. However, most of the rooms exceeded ten meders in width.
The circular floor was like a fortress, standing five stories tall and wrapped in five massive round walls, with stairs leading to the next floor located at the very center. Adventurers needed to traverse many wide-open, exposed hallways as well as go up and down numerous stairwells in order to reach the center. Its size rivaled that of Orario itself. Although a route through the floor had been discovered and mapped, getting lost in this multileveled maze meant never seeing the light of day again.
The ceilings were so high that even top-class adventurers with their enhanced vision had difficulty seeing them. This gave the White Palace a gloomy atmosphere in every dimly lit hallway. The few lights present in the walls were barely strong enough to illuminate the adventurers’ faces as they passed.
“You know, Aiz has been pretty scary since that day in Rivira. Just watching her is making my blood run cold. Was that Tamer woman really that strong?”
“Ngah~! No clue! But I’m going to the front, too!”
“Ah, hey! Take care of the ones around us first!”
Tiona swung Urga with all her might, forcing her way through the oncoming swarm of more than twenty monsters to catch up with Aiz on the front line. Tione kicked it into high gear, covering her sister while yelling at her back.
Apart from the expansive terrain, the thirty-seventh floor also had more types of enemies than some levels beyond the fortieth floor. What’s worse, their respawning interval was extremely short. The one saving grace was that the same monsters consistently appeared at the same places. However, even a top-class adventurer would suffer the consequences if they decided to charge straight in unprepared.
Monsters kept barreling forward from the other end of the wide hallway. Tione, Finn, and Riveria worked in tandem to repel their attack and protect their two supporters.
“UUGGHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!”
“!”
Aiz was already far out in front of the party, taking on a group by herself. A tall and thick creature called a barbarian swung a natural weapon at her, but she deftly avoided the attack and brought her saber forward. Her counter landed at the same moment the long club slammed into the ground. The barbarian dissolved into ash amid the echoes.
Many warrior-type monsters appeared on this floor: the barbarian, which boasted a body on par with a Minotaur; an upgraded form of the lizardman monster known as the lizardman elite, which first appeared on the nineteenth floor; a dark-black rock monster known
as an obsidian soldier. Humanoid fiends filled the hallways of the White Palace.
Since all of them specialized in hand-to-hand combat, this floor was absolute torture for magic users. Without time to conjure their spells, they were extremely vulnerable to close-range attacks. Even worse was the fact that some of the monsters, especially the obsidian soldier, had natural protection against magic, thanks to the stones present in their bodies. A pure magic user like Lefiya could do little more than watch the battle unfold as Finn and Riveria set to work.
“HAAaaa!”
“!”
A barbarian opened its massive chin, lashing his long tongue through the air.
Spinning out of the path of the attack, Aiz slashed it into oblivion as it uttered its dying scream. Wasting no time, she charged forward to engage a stout obsidian soldier and sliced the animated pile of rocks in half.
Another corpse joined the pile building at her feet, ash falling in her wake. Every slash of her silver saber cut through multiple targets and sent streams of blood spurting into the air.
Desire burned in her golden eyes as they searched for the next enemy. Gaze focused, she cut through monsters coming at her from all directions, tracing circles with her feet as though she was a hurricane of saber slices.
A ring of dying breaths sounded in the hallway.
“Yeah, might want to keep a little bit of distance…Riveria, hasn’t she told you anything? The pain of a single failure wouldn’t drive someone this close to the deep end.”
“She would not tell. She simply says, ‘It’s nothing,’ and does not utter another word.”
Finn looked uncomfortable, frowning. Riveria sighed, her frustration coming to the surface.
The monsters in their area slain, the two had nothing left to do but watch Aiz’s battle from afar. Tiona had finally reached the blond-haired, golden-eyed girl, and the two of them wiped out the remaining monsters in no time flat.
“Looks like there’s no point in trying to get to the bottom of this right now…Yeesh.”
“Um, General, Lady Riveria…Is Miss Aiz all right?”
“Usually an empty stomach will slow her down when she gets like this…We know she has not eaten a thing, so we should offer some food. That might calm her.”
“Y-yes.”
A bead of sweat trickled down Lefiya’s cheek as she was taken aback by Riveria’s surprisingly knowledgeable tone.
Tiona, Tione, and Lefiya had watched Aiz with obvious concern over the past few days, but Finn and Riveria had told them to let her be. They seemed to know something the other girls didn’t, so all three of them chose to put their faith in their leaders. After all, Finn and Riveria had spent more time with Aiz than they.
The two supporters quickly collected all the loot, and the party moved on. Traveling toward the center of the floor in a single-file line, they cleared the last wall and continued their journey in the innermost section of the White Palace.
There was a place on the thirty-seventh floor of the Dungeon where monsters consistently spawned at alarming rate; it was known as the Dungeon’s Coliseum. Naturally, Aiz wanted to charge right in, but of course, her allies stopped her this time. They pressed on, encountering swarms at every turn.
While Aiz didn’t stop her aggressive fighting style, she also didn’t do anything that put her allies at risk. She never lost sight of the fact she was a member of the battle party and acted accordingly. Her aloof expression returned the moment each battle ended, and she even participated in the Amazonian twins’ banter while giving clear answers to their questions.
Only when she drew her saber did she take on a different demeanor.
“We’ve already slain a ton of monsters, so it probably gets us a crap-ton of money, right? This is, what, our fifth day in the Dungeon?”
“Yeah, I guess……”
“I mean, if we took all this stuff back to the surface, we’ve got to have three million valis, easy. Lefiya, how much do we have in contracts?”
“Please wait a moment, I shall check…Just from the quests we took in Rivira, we have a little less than a million valis, I believe.”
Looking for an interesting topic, Tiona engaged Aiz in conversation. The original reason that the two of them had come to the Dungeon in the first place was to repay the loan for Urga the Second and to replace the rapier Aiz had used while Desperate was being repaired. Remembering their earlier goal sent Aiz’s mind in a different direction, bringing up images of the boy who reminded her of a white rabbit, and the fact she still had to apologize to him.
Aiz shook her head and chased the images away. She didn’t have time for that. At the same time, the thought of standing before him, the way she was now…seemed like tarnishing a precious jewel. It was somehow scary.
Aiz looked away from Tiona. Meanwhile, Tione helped Lefiya get a better estimate on their loot.
Whenever the party couldn’t carry any more stones or items, they would return to the town of Rivira and trade the items for deeds to make more room.
Since they could never get full price while still underground, they kept the truly valuable items to sell once they got back to the surface. They unloaded everything else in Rivira. Trading the items in for quests was much more efficient than dragging everything up to the surface and coming back down.
“Ah, this room.”
Fighting their way through waves of level-three and level-four monsters, the battle party finally arrived at a room that was noticeably larger than the rest.
This is…
Aiz took time to study their surroundings even while engaged in combat with the cluster of enemies already inside the wide area.
The rooms in the White Palace steadily increased in length and width closer to the center. This particular room was overwhelmingly huge, so adventurers who had passed through the White Palace never forgot it. The blond knight’s vigilance paid off when her gaze swept over the floor.
That’s when she caught a glimpse of it.
Crack!
“You hear that? Where’d it come from?”
“Not the walls. The floor.”
Several lizardman elites went flying, courtesy of Urga’s blades, as Tiona sprang into action. Tione’s Kukri were nothing more than silver flashes as she answered her sister’s question.
The cracking echoes weren’t coming from all around them, but from beneath their feet. The fissures spread out like a spiderweb in a matter of seconds. No less than ten monsters emerged from the floor in the blink of an eye.
Monsters with no muscles or skin, only bones.
Parts of their exposed skeletons were thicker to make sharp pieces of armor all around their bodies. Each one of them was born carrying a bone sword or bone ax in one hand and a bone shield in the other.
Spartoi.
Another warrior-class monster of the thirty-seventh floor, like the barbarian.
“Finn, I’m going.”
“Wait, Aiz!”
Spartois were the most physically dangerous monsters on this floor.
Despite their appearance, they were extremely strong and fast. Wielding several different types of weapons, facing off against one of these was similar to fighting against a skilled adventurer.
Aiz jumped in front of the battle party to take her level-four-category opponents from the front; she left the rest to Tiona and the others. Desperate hummed as it came out of its sheath. The blond knight couldn’t care less that she was outnumbered as she charged into the group of spartois.
“!”
“GAHH!”
The closest skeleton led with its shield, sword high above his head, ready to strike. Aiz took it head-on, sweeping her saber forward.
The shield couldn’t repel Desperate, and Aiz charged through the collapsing skeleton to dodge an oncoming bone lance from the side. The lancer stepped past her as Aiz avoided a bone ax that came down right where her head had been a moment earlier and knocked a sword wielded by the largest monster of the bunch to the side. A flash of silver
went through each enemy as she passed. Several severed torsos fell to the ground at her feet.
“OOO-OOHHH!”
“!!”
“…!”
Black, eyeless sockets focused on Aiz, and Aiz alone.
Bones rattled as the monsters quickly glanced at each other, setting up a plan like a pack of wolves hunting their prey.
Aiz glared back at the monsters, who had not only mastered their individual weapons but advanced teamwork as well. But that wasn’t about to stop her. She charged forward, silver saber flashing.
Five minutes of intense combat passed in which Aiz couldn’t overlook a single detail and even felt a little anxious in the middle of it all.
Now there was only one left, and Aiz went airborne with Desperate coming straight down.
“GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
The blade sliced through the top of its head all the way down to the base of its hip. The monster’s dying scream faded along with its broken magic stone as its body turned to ash.
Swish! All the spartois dispatched, Aiz whipped her blade through the air before pointing its cutting edge toward the ground.
It was impossible to count all the cleanly sliced bones scattered about the floor. The few stones that were intact sparkled inside their bony cages, dark purple speckles in the dim light.
The blond knight stood in the middle of the remains of at least ten monsters, letting the sounds of battle dissipate around her as the dust settled.
“…And she did it all herself.”
“She’d be a lot cuter if she pretended to be in trouble every now and then…”
The Amazonian twins sighed, one criticizing and the other pointing out the irony of the situation. They watched as Aiz left the now-tranquil battlefield and headed back to the group.
She returned Desperate to its sheath and acknowledged Lefiya and the other supporter as they passed.
“…Very well done, Miss Aiz.”
“Thanks…I leave the rest to you, Lefiya.”
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? On the Side: Sword Oratoria, Vol. 2 Page 17